Nokia Unveils Asha 210, A QWERTY Phone With WhatsApp Button

Nokia Corporation (NYSE:NOK) has unveiled the latest addition to its Asha lineup. This new QWERTY phone is named as Nokia Asha 210, which can be termed as a feature phone and is targeted towards budget conscious users. The phone comes in two flavors – single SIM and dual-SIM but what makes it standout from its competitor is the dedicated WhatsApp button.

Asha 210 comes with a 2.4″ LCD screen of QVGA resolution (320 x 240 pixels) with full QWERTY keyboard. Talking about the memory, then the phone comes with 64MB internal memory, but there’s a microSD card support which can help you expand the storage up to 32GB. The phone is mostly targeted towards youngsters who spend a lot of time on texting, and now with a dedicated WhatsApp button, there’s nothing that’s going to stop those people from texting. What’s more, WhatsApp is also offering its service to Asha 210 owners for free over the lifespan of the device.

The Asha 210 sports a 2 megapixel camera at the back, with no front camera offering. The phone supports only 2G, GPRS/EDGE, with no support for fast cellular network like 3G or 4G LTE. Connectivity wise, it comes with WiFi, microUSB support and Bluetooth.

The phone comes with Nokia’s Easy Swap technology which enables users to switch between multiple SIM cards, easily. There’s an easily accessible door on the side of the device so that the user can easily change the secondary SIM card without restarting the device; however, the primary SIM card is still kept on the back of the battery.

Timo Toikkanen, executive vice president of Nokia says “The Nokia Asha 210 really stands out giving super-social consumers new ways to express their personalities through design, colour and innovations like the world’s first WhatsApp button.” He further adds “It has been designed to allow people to easily update their social networks, stay in touch with friends and share user created content.”

Nokia says that it comes with a long battery life: up to 46 days with Single-SIM and up to 24 days with Dual-SIM.

The Nokia Asha 210 is available in yellow, cyan, black, magenta, and white. The phone can cost around $72, and is expected to start shipping in the second quarter of 2013.